A newly unveiled record has added gas to the controversy. It’s a German letter despatched through a German Jesuit member of the anti-Nazi resistance, Father Lother Koenig, and addressed to the pope’s relied on personal secretary Rev. Robert Leiber. Within the letter dated Dec. 14, 1942, Koenig wrote that as much as 6,000 other people, “above all Poles and Jews,” have been death on a daily basis in “SS-furnaces” on the Nazi-run Bełzec focus camp in what used to be then occupied Poland. Reported this week through Italian day by day Corriere Della Sera, the letter used to be came upon through Vatican archivist Giovanni Coco, who described it as additional proof of a float of particular and detailed information on Nazi crimes to the Holy See.
From March to December 1942, about 450,000 Jews, most commonly from Poland, have been killed on the Belzec focus camp, in accordance to the web page of the museum and memorial in Belzec.
Within the years since Pius XII’s papacy ended, critics have scrutinized his motion, or meant inactivity, right through the struggle. Holocaust survivors have lobbied to freeze his sainthood procedure.
When the thousands and thousands of pages within the Pius archives have been opened in 2020, Pope Francis stated the Church used to be “no longer frightened of historical past” and that Pius’s papacy had “moments of grave difficulties, tormented choices of human and Christian prudence, that to a few could seem as reticence,” in step with PBS.
In his 2022 e book “The Pope at Conflict,” historian and anthropologist David Kertzer argued that Pius put the Catholic Church forward of ethical management, nervous that hostility towards Hitler would possibly purpose the nations to wreck with the church. Pius XII had additionally first of all idea he may just negotiate with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and mood Nazi hatred with international relations, the writer wrote. Whilst the pope acted moderately amid preliminary issues that Axis powers might sooner or later regulate Europe, Pius XII by no means modified his manner whilst proof, and pleas for the Vatican to take a stand, fastened.
“As an ethical chief, Pius XII should be judged a failure,” the historian wrote.
